president bush decides after 9/11 that we have to go to war in afghanistan and iraq. and that means we're going to have to spend billions of dollars that we hadn't accounted for. if we had a balanced budget amendment, we wouldn't have been able to do that without raising taxes significantly. there's no way we could have cut spending quickly enough to be able to finance going to war. so there are some contingencies that make a balanced budget something that we should think twice about. you know, there's another great saying, be careful what you wish for. and we don't want to get ourselves in that hole. but if we had a federal capital budget, which would allow us to do our long-term investing offline, not on the operating budget, it might be something to be considered. but not now and not for politics. and it doesn't have anything to do with the short-term problem of getting ourselves out of the deficit. if we had a balanced budget amendment that passed in the next two years, we'd have to make massive cuts and huge tax increases to balance the budget in year three. ther